Life in the Big Hairy

Hmm.... the final day of this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Off to
the San Diego Zoo? Perhaps cocktails on the deck of the Coronado Hotel where
Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz? How about a bracing discussion of the
challenges facing Linux in the enterprise? An obvious choice.

Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann is clearly enthusiastic about the progress Linux and
open-source software is making in the enterprise. "Enterprise CEOs are not
afraid of open source," he told the audience of several hundred developers.
"And the word 'free' is not important to them. It's the ability of the software
to work reliably, and the ability to innovate with it."

To prove his point, Tiemann introduced enterprise technology leaders who are
fully conversant with the open-source philosophy, and see it as key to their
ongoing success.

PDI/DreamWorks' Ed Leonard brought the predictable slide of Shrek holding
Tux in his hands -- a shot which was somehow dropped on the cutting room floor (a
virtual floor, these days). Shrek is important to Linux, said Leonard, because
computerized feature animation pushes all kinds of limits. The PDI team uses
many standard tools such as Perl, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and the emacs text editor.
But much of the work is done with closely held proprietary tools on Linux
rendering farms.

For many years, this was the realm of Silicon Graphics workstations and
mid-range servers. But as Intel's offerings steadily approached the same level
of performance, it became clear that a shift to Intel platforms would be
necessary. A disruption needed to occur in the artistic process, one which could
only be justified by gains in performance, scalability, and cost.

PDI is now fully committed to Linux, and a survey conducted at an industry
summit in June revealed that this segment of the entertainment industry will be
overwhelmingly on Linux by late 2002. Some graphics companies have been waiting
for 64-bit Linux, while others have established relationships that prevent
them from considering the move.

W. Phillip Moore, a principal with the Enterprise Application Infrastructure
group in the Information Technology department of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
& Co., said many enterprise challenges are common to all organizations. He
called for better auditing and change-control tools, and is developing
capacity-planning tools to help cope with the company's growth.

Tiemann observed that while proprietary software has an infinite cost
(upgrades, support) and infinite bugs, it has limited support. In contrast,
open-source software has finite bugs and infinite possibilities.

While Hewlett-Packard received a special nod from the panel as a major vendor that
understands how to fold open-source development back into its products, it was
clear from the debate that a new community of software developers is now
joining the open-source movement. As more CIOs and internal development teams
work with open-source software, we'll see enterprises working together to solve common
enterprise-level problems that may not be addressed by solution vendors. XML
standards have already had this effect, bringing together many organizations
for the first time. Soon, a new generation of business tools, utilities, and
operating system enhancements will emerge from within enterprise IT
departments. Tools designed by and for enterprises.

Big, hairy solutions for big, hairy problems.

Malcolm Dean
is a broadcast journalist, technology writer and IT consultant
based in Los Angeles.